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Despite military pressures, South Korea is booming. The gross national product spurted ahead by 13.1% last year. Exports totaled $455 million, compared with $33 million in 1960, and the 1971 target is $1 billion.
The Real Targets. Strong, prospering and politically stable under the government of President Chung Hee Park, South Koreans nonetheless worry about national morale. North Korea's downing of the U.S. EC-121 electronic intelligence plane two weeks ago set off cries for quick retaliation. Kim Chai Soon, spokesman for the ruling Democratic Republican Party, says that "the U.S. should have at least bombed the North Korean air base from which the MIGs took off to attack the plane."
That is a sentiment most South Koreans share. They know that what really animates North Korea's hatred of the U.S. is the American defense of South Korea, and that they are the real targets of Pyongyang's aggression. Any military humiliation of the U.S. is a humiliation of South Korea as well—and could, if repeated often enough, eventually undermine the government's credibility with South Korea's peasants.